It’s easy to assume that The Eastwood Rule is named in honor of the much-decorated actor/director, but it’s really a rebuke from his colleagues in the DGA. In 1976, after two decades as an actor most famous for his roles as a handsome, lanky, and taciturn quick-draw artist in Westerns on TV and the big screen, Clint Eastwood was starring in “The Outlaw Josey Wales.” The director of the picture, Philip Kaufman, was taking a very deliberate approach to casting and rehearsals, which was putting the film behind schedule. Eastwood and Kaufman clashed, badly.
According to Patrick McGilligan’s biography “Clint: The Life and Legend“: “Kaufman’s methodical pace was anathema to him. The introspective Kaufman made Clint nervous, pacing around in his leather cowboy hat like Sergio Leone, studiously weighing his options and framing his shots.”
After over a month of clashes between Eastwood and Kaufman, the actor was able to leverage his clout as the lead actor and a co-producer to have Kaufman removed from the project, taking on the director’s responsibilities himself, as described in “Clint: The Life and Legend.” Good for Eastwood, maybe, but the DGA was not impressed, fining the new director $60,000 (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that’s about $300,000 in 2022) and adopting a new clause in their contracts that stipulated imposing harsher fines and revoking a director’s membership in the guild if a producer violated the rule a second time by firing and personally taking over as director.
